Bitcoin News

American financial services companyVisa, which has expressed its enthusiasm towards bitcoin, Ethereum and blockchain technology over the past few years, is looking to hire blockchain talents to build blockchain-based financial applications to improve existing infrastructures.

Earlier this week, Visa released its job offering for blockchain engineers that have had built applications on top of the Ethereum, Ripple and bitcoin blockchain networks suitable for financial service providers and large-scale commercial companies such as Visa.

“We're seeking a strong developer experienced with Ethereum and blockchain architecture to be a part of team tasked with building distributed application. Our ideal candidate has built and released distributed applications, has worked with the Ripple, R3, Ethereum and/or Bitcoin blockchain, and has experience with Solidity.”

In October of 2016, Visa revealed the launch of its first blockchain-based application through its partnership with blockchain infrastructure provider Chain. The development team behind Visa announced that the financial conglomerate aims to utilize a business-to-business (B2B) payment solution built on top of the Chain blockchain infrastructure at a commercial scale, to facilitate transactions and the transfer of data using various private blockchains.

“The time has never been better for the global business community to take advantage of new payment technologies and improve some of the most fundamental processes needed to run their businesses. We are developing our new solution to give our financial institution partners an efficient, transparent way for payments to be made across the world,” Jim McCarthy, executive vice president of innovation and strategic partnerships at Visa, said at the time.

Since then, developers and researchers at Visa focused on improving its existing infrastructure that is used to transact trillions of dollars on an annual basis. Specifically, the official Visa statistical overview released earlier this year revealed that Visa settled 141 billion transactions totaling $8.9 trillion throughout 2016.

The collaborative blockchain project between Visa and Chain solely aims to implement private blockchains to settle transactions. In theory, Visa will be able to utilize Chain’s blockchain infrastructure and various private blockchains to settle transactions that are separated from the primary or official Visa network.

According to the official job description released by Visa, the financial conglomerate is seeking to establish a team of blockchain engineers to create a major blockchain-based platform that can serve as an internal infrastructure for settling transactions and data.

Because Chain and the Visa development team are already co-developing private blockchains that are customized for Visa’s requirements, with the new blockchain development team, Visa is likely aiming the development of decentralized, transparent and secure blockchain-based systems deployed on top of public blockchain networks such as Ethereum and Bitcoin.

It is also likely that the newly established Visa blockchain development team will run various tests on the four abovementioned blockchain networks--Ethereum, bitcoin, R3 and Ripple--and come to a consensus as to which blockchain network is the most efficient for handling Visa transactions.

As an increasing number of financial service providers such as Visa experiment with blockchain technology, the cryptocurrency market will continue to grow at an exponential rate in a wide range of measures such as user base, market value and demand.

Author : Joseph Young

Joseph Young is a finance and tech journalist based in Hong Kong. He has worked with leading media and news agencies in the technology and finance industries, offering exclusive content, interviews, insights and analysis of cryptocurrencies, innovative and futuristic technologies.